The latest edition of Innovations features an in-depth analysis of our Materials Transfer work, one of our three main areas of focus at Science Commons. The analysis was written by Science Commons counsel Thinh Nguyen, who also leads our efforts in this area.

In the article, Nguyen provides the necessary background information about the current system of transferring biological materials between research institutions, and the contractual framework associated.

“Access to unique research resources, such as biological materials and reagents, is vital to the success and advancement of science. Many research protocols require assembling a large and diverse set of materials from many sources. Yet, often the process of finding and negotiating the transfer of such materials can be difficult and time- consuming. […]

[…] Science Commons’s Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) Project seeks to reduce unnecessary barriers to the transfer and reuse of basic research materials and reagents, for both United States and international scientific collaboration, by proposing a scalable and flexible infrastructure for searching, negotiation and tracking.”

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The netlabel music scene is booming. These ultra-wired record labels focus on the online distribution of digital audio files, which in most cases, are released under Creative Commons licenses. This means that, in the netaudio world, artists often retain their copyright, producers can offer free downloads for promotion, and fans can hear the music when and how they want — for free.

The festival succeeded in demonstrating to party-goers the variety and sound quality of netaudio. It was a perfect platform to encourage alternative licensing, get feedback from the community, and just listen to some great music!

One of the largest book fairs in the world, the Frankfurt Book Fair, was held this year on October 10-14th in Frankfurt am Main. The city’s fair is the annual host of 300,000 visitors to over 7,000 exhibitions celebrating literature and cultures from around the world. The event also functions as a global meet-up for authors, publishers, and other members of the book industry to chat over coffee and negotiate deals for publishing rights, licensing fees, and translation.

This year, Creative Commons was an active participant at the Frankfurt Book Fair and helped raise awareness about alternative licensing and literature online. Catharina Maracke joined a panel about licensing on the internet, in which she discussed possibilities for fostering a hybrid economy with literary texts and existing content curators.

Wikimedia Commons is “a central repository for freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media of all sorts that are useful for any Wikimedia project.”

While Wikimedia Commons is surely one of the premier repositories of free cultural works on the web, it does live in the shadow of Wikipedia, which it (mainly) serves. In the words of Commons editor Brianna Laugher:

We live with being identified via Wikipedia, it’s like being Albert Einstein’s sister.

To compile the metrics I used the Internet Systems Consortium July 2007 list of top-level domain names by host count distribution. From that I selected the 71 domains with more than 100,000 hosts. I then run a Google search for all pages in each domain (for instance .edu) and a search for the pages in that domain containing the string “creative commons”. The results, ordered by the percentage of pages containing the consecutive words “creative commons”, (most of which are presumably licensed by a corresponding license) are striking.

Of course “unported” licenses are available for use anywhere, and apparently are being used heavily in places without jurisdiction licenses. The next ranking top level domain without corresponding launched CC jurisdiction ported licenses is Morocco, at #15. CC Morocco, anyone?

Spain (at #5) and Latin American domains rank high, corresponding nicely with Giorgos Cheliotis’ research, which found (using completely different methods, and looking only at jurisdiction ported licenses) that Spainish licenses stand out in terms of CC adoption.

Last year influential avant garde musician and activist Bob Ostertag made all of his recordings that he has the rights to available as digital downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

In March of 2006, I put all my recordings to which I owned the rights (14 CDs) up for free download from this site. w00t is my first release to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Please download, copy, send to your friends, remix, mutilate, and mash-up. And please support this attempt to build free culture by sending a link for w00t to your friends. w00t consists of a 50-minute sound collage, a 4.5 minute sound “trailer,” and associated cover art. There is, however, no cover. w00t is a free, internet-only release.

As with most of Ostertag’s work, the art has a political purpose, which one can choose to hear, or not:

The w00t music began as the sound for Special Forces, a live cinematic performance by Living Cinema (Pierre Hébert and Bob Ostertag), which addressed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

But that is just the beginning of the story, for the accelerating rate of technological change continues to push digital technology further and further into our lives in just about any direction you might look. To pick just one example, boundaries between our bodies and minds and our technology are blurring. Cochlear implants, for example, now allow deaf people to hear via computer chips loaded with copyrighted software which are implanted in their skulls and in response to which their brains reconfigure, growing new synapses while unused synapses fade. Cochlear implants are wirelessly networked to hardware worn outside the body which usually connects to a mic, thus allowing the deaf to hear the sound environment around them. But the external hardware can just as easily be plugged into a laptop’s audio output for a direct audio tap into the Web.

When the Web extends into chips in our skulls, where is the boundary between language that is carved up into words that are corporately owned and language that is free for the thinking?

I don’t wish to be sensationalist. We are not all about to turn into corporately-owned cyborgs. But I do wish to point out that the issues around turning culture into property are urgent, and far-reaching. Society is not well-served if we treat specific matters like downloading music on the Web as isolated problems instead of one manifestation of a vastly bigger struggle in which much more is at stake.